Surprise! War is Hell

The horror of war has always made good and wise men seek to avoid war at all costs. Whether the Iraqi prisoners were "tortured" or not does not matter.

OK. This is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. That people are tortured does not matter???!!!! Well, I suppose it will not matter if we torture you neocon scum! Does it also not matter that 90% of the incarcerated were innocent??

War is the RAF dropping incendiary bombs night after summer night on Hamburg while the American Eighth Air Force dropped explosive bombs day after summer day, until the second largest city in Germany becomes a vast molten firestorm filled with immolated babies and grandmothers.

Perhaps I should state the obvious since you are obviously an idiot: War is bad and should be avoided. Do not take as given that our fighting WWII was good or necessary. If we stayed out and Germany won, the world would be much the same, but we would not have sacrificed any American lives and would have better moral authority in the world. Stalin's power would have been checked by Germany.

War is the systematic sinking of all sinking in the archipelago Empire of Japan, until the millions of innocent Japanese doomed to starvation and the horrific living suns of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are tortures, but relatively merciful tortures, of countless children and other non-combatants.

Most critcal-thinking individuals have concluded that it was a moral outrage that we dropped atomic bombs on Japan, especially given that the war was essentially over by that time. Nuclear weapons are not exactly precision-guided weapons.

But war is not war simply because nations choose to fight or governments choose to fight.

What??? War can only occur when both sides choose to fight. It takes two to tango and two to fight. As if Bush did not choose to fight Iraq, which posed no real threat to the US.

War is the infliction of pain upon those whose pain will ultimately bring a surrender.

Who are we trying to get to surrender by torturing innocent Iraqis?

The idea of war as a legal concept is pure fiction. War is violence inflicted upon enemies or those treasured by enemies. This violence is not kind.

There are provoked, unkind, and de-escalating responses and then there are cruel, unprovoked, and escalating acts of violence. These are not subtle distinctions.

Coventry, Dresden and Tokyo were filled with children tortured to death from miles above. Was this unspeakable torture of innocents, per se, any better than the butchery of Japanese soldiers in Nanking in 1938 or the Red Army cramming millions of Polish Christians into cattle cars in 1939 and 1940 or the Schultzstaffel gassing Jewish mothers and children in death camps?

No.

Well, yes, it was better. Americans tried to use "pinpoint" bombing, which meant smart weapons.

Nuclear weapons are not pinpoint weapons and the conventional weapons used in WWII were horribly inaccurate.

The British had also tried that early in the Second World War, but abandoned that when it proved woefully ineffectively and prohibitively costly. The Japanese merchant ships sunk by American submarines had oil and raw materials essential for war as their priority cargo. If they had only carried food, American military power would have been redirected to other targets.

But there is a deeper difference that the reluctance of democracies to use terror and the eagerness of totalitarians to use terror than just the intention behind the means.

You have not demonstrated this at all. British treatment of Germans after the war was vicious.

It mattered not only to Brits, but to Frenchmen and to Dutchmen and to Czechs whether Britain or Germany prevailed in the Second World War.

Obviously, they were on our side.

There was a strategic morality to the democratic allies in the Second World War and in the Cold War. Indeed, not only was it better for Belgians and Danes that the Allies win, but it was better to the children and grandchildren of those horribly burned victims in Hamburg, Dresden and Berlin that their side lose and the other side win.

So that they could be slaughtered by the Russians.

So it matters to the Iraqi people that America prevail in Iraq, because America will create a better land for the Iraqi people than they have been able to create for themselves.

Is that why Iraqi makes comments such as "Saddam was bad, but life under the American occupation is worse."

Those relatives of the humiliated prisoners mistreated by Americans are better off if the Americans win than if Americans lose.

So that they can have the priviledge of being assaulted by American soldiers.

Acknowledging that fact, of course, is the great torture of all peoples who hold their own destiny in their hands and yet have failed to turn opportunity into hope.

Let's not give them what they want (freedom). Let's give them what we know is good for them. This hurts us more than it hurts you.

The torture that is violence and the violence that is war also has another moral dimension.

It is great fun to conflate: Torture is violence. Violence is War. War is a lesson. Lessons are acts of love.

Wars are not waged by men who know that they will unquestionably lose not only their life but the cause for which they are willing to die and to kill. Perhaps we should think less of Iraq today, less even of Operation Iraqi Freedom, less of Operation Desert Storm, and more of Operation Enduring Freedom - the liberation of Afghanistan from the Taliban.

Yes, let us not think of these previous fiascos.

America did not begin a war with Afghanistan.

Oh really, what would you call it? A "dance"?

The Taliban had been waging a war for years against the essentially helpless women and children of Afghanistan.

Funny, history says that the Taliban rose to power because of their defense of women against local warlords.

The incredible technological superiority of American power, combined with the exceptional training of American fighting forces, meant that the Taliban, who had with some good reason assumed that their landlocked stronghold in some of the wildest and most inaccessible terrain on the planet made them safe.

Seems they are doing just fine, especially Bin Laden. I suspect they will make a comeback after the Americans go away.

They guessed wrongly. America could have liberated Afghanistan with huge armies of troops rooting out Taliban and suspected sympathizers with savage fighting.

America, instead, used absolutely overwhelming and precise firepower with no regard to any political flak from any corner.

Without "political flak" we undoubtedly would have committed worse attrocities.

The torturing of the Taliban, the Nazis of Central Asia, ended quickly and with few casualties.

So you call 3000+ civilian casualties "few".

The money America spent on gold plated weaponry and an elite volunteer military cost us huge treasure, but the crime of the Clinton Presidency was not spending much, much, much, much, much more on weapons and training and bribery of foreign agents.

Do you just make up your "facts" as convenient; our weapons spending is at an all time high.

The pathetic excuse of spending money on "food programs" in a nation filled with fat, poor people; the lame argument that children and parents glued to inane television programs need more money for "public education" to learn; the nanny notion that better health care is needed for adults who take destructive drugs and indulge in dangerous pleasures - all this fraudulent "compassion" meant only more torture and fear to the women and children of Afghanistan.

You're right. I don't need my money. The goverment will make much better use of it by torturing innocent Iraqis, so that we can have more terrorists in the Arab world.

These torture victims, of course, could not vote for Clinton or Gore.

And they sure as hell would not vote for Bush.

That is what really matters to those who yelp today about the mistreatment of Iraqis who until recently had meted out incomparably more sadistic torments upon the women, children and other innocents of Iraq.

I repeat the Red Cross concluded that 90% were innocent. Picked up for yelling at a neighbor or because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

War is Hell - what a surprise!

So you support us torturing foreigners even though it has no strategic purpose? By the same token, Saddam could just say that he was in a civil war.

- and war is not a formal, legal or political process, but it is rather the infliction of violence and of tortures by one group on others. The way to minimize this is for those who hate war to be vastly strongly than those who love war.

The way to minimize this is to fire and prosecute Rumsfeld, suspend the budget of our war-waging machine, and punish the soldiers who perpetrate this.

This the sort of genuine government "investment" - the investment of oceans of tax dollars to prevent the torture, the destruction and the danger to freedom which war produces.

Let me see: The production of torture, destruction, and suspension of freedom is needed to end torture, destruction and promote freedom. Following your logic, the more that our military tortures and sodomizes, the more money that we should give them.

But preventing the Hell of War, with all its attendant tortures on all the innocent and guilty touched by war, requires those men who hate war to so arm, so train, and to so unite themselves that no evildoers consider, except in their grisly dreams, anything violent at all against the rest of the human race.

Black is white. Up is down. War is peace.

If we want to end war, mayhem, torture and destruction, then make certain that those who wish the human race torment, slavery and fear correctly perceive themselves as overwhelmingly weaker than those who wish peace, freedom and hope. There is no greater "investment" we can make. Any politician who pretends otherwise also believes the odious myth that Nazi Germany, one of the best educated, healthiest, wealthiest and most confident nations in history, would not have committed its unimaginable savageries if the Germans had only been a little more learned, a little more physically fit, a little more prosperous or had a bit more self-esteem.

Excuse me!! Germany was desperately poor and had constant class warfare when the Nazis took over. If they had been more learned about economics, they would not have embraced either nationalism or socialism.

Any politician who pretends that the good having overwhelmingly greater physical power and moral will than the evil is the only sure guard against war, genocide and torture is himself an unwitting Nazi and an unknowing Chekist.

Black is white. Up is down. War is peace. Peace lovers are Nazis.

The author may be right about one thing. On net, democracies may be less cruel than totalitarian regimes, but I will only believe it if we do the right thing and eject the current administration, prosecute the war criminals in the current administration, and slash our war machine budget.